'ROC' IS STILL ROLLING

Roger LaRue is back in the music business - after learning he's a rockabilly legend

ROGER BULL

Roger LaRue didn't even know he was famous.

Sure, he'd cut a few songs back in the 1950s when he fronted a rock 'n' roll band. He had the look: young and thin, dark hair slicked back. He had a great stage name: Roc LaRue. He even had that Elvis sneer and shake when he wanted to.

He became something of a star in the Northeast for a couple of years. But that was so long ago, when he was still in his teens. He'd quit the music business decades ago and moved on to real life: wife, kids, a career designing plumbing systems for ships.

Then four years ago, his son, Roger LaRue Jr., was looking up his own name on the Internet, because everyone does that from time to time. But he didn't expect to find what he found.

"Hey dad," he called to his father, "didn't you used to be known as Roc? You better come look at this."

There, on the Rockabilly Hall of Fame's Web site, in a long list of rockabilly legends, was Roger "Roc" LaRue.

"I gave them a call," LaRue said, "and then I went on the discussion board and said 'This is Roc LaRue.' So help me, for weeks I was getting e-mails from all over the world. I tear up now thinking about it. People were thinking about me all those years and I didn't know anything about it."

LaRue, 68, started singing in his hometown of Fall River, Mass. Country music at first, playing six nights a week on TV with Hank Zero and the Pioneers. Lots of Hank Williams. And he got invited to join a local rock band, the Three Pals.

"They were doing the Elvis Presley-type stuff," LaRue said, "and they knew I could do it."

It was off to the Catskill Mountains, 17 years old and singing rock 'n' roll at summer resorts. The next year, 1957, he and the band recorded Baby Take Me Back, still the song he's best known for. It was pure hiccuping rockabilly, and things really took off. The band became Roc LaRue and the Three Pals, then Roc LaRue and His Pals. On each record, his name got bigger and the band's smaller.

A Roc LaRue fan club popped up. And, there he was, playing concerts with his heroes Carl Perkins and Eddie Cochran. He played Harlem's Apollo Theater the same night as Jackie Wilson.

When they weren't on the road through New York and New England, he and the band played six nights a week at the Wagon Wheel Lounge in New York City. LaRue was 18 and on top of the world.

It ended as quickly as it began.

"By late 1959, my style went right down and I didn't know why," he said. "I was scheduled to go to California to do a promo for my record. I was supposed to do a screen test. John Wayne was bringing a lot of the younger guys, Ricky Nelson and Fabian, into his movies, and I was thinking 'What if he picks me?' "

But his manager started showing up less and less at his shows, spending more time with Joey Dee and the Starlighters, who had a hit with Peppermint Twist. The California trip was canceled. The music was changing from rock to pop, from hard to light.

Bob Timmers, who runs the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, remembers it all too well. He was a teenager then, playing weekends in Wisconsin.

"By 1962," Timmers said, "we thought rock had died. We had Motown and the Beach Boys."

To this day, he blames it on American Bandstand, where every afternoon on black-and-white television, Dick Clark brought on stars to lip-sync their hits.

"You could feel what the people wanted, they wanted the Top 40," Timmers said. "And who was giving us the Top 40? It was Bandstand. It all became more homogenized and whiter. Even hard rockers like Johnny Burnette had to go mellow to get back on track."

Back in New York, LaRue's band fell apart.

"What I should have done was regroup and change the style," LaRue said. "I could have made the transition to other rock 'n' roll, like Bobby Darin."

Instead, he went back to Fall River and formed a country band before he gave up and joined the Army. He played country music for a while in New England after he got out, but eventually gave that up, too.

In 1978, lured by a job and chased by New England winters, he and his family moved to Jacksonville. He played in church from time to time, but that was about it. He told a few friends at work about his musical past, but they just laughed, so he quit bringing it up.

But all that changed when his son looked on the Internet and found out his dad was a legend.

Since he's been rediscovered, LaRue has played a few festivals in Wisconsin, Indiana and England featuring the originals, the survivors of that era. Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson, Bill Haley's Comets, Roc LaRue.

Later this month, he'll fly to France for another show. Europeans, he said, hold a particular fondness for those who were there at the birth of rock 'n' roll.

Last year, the Swedish magazine American Music put a vintage photo of LaRue on its cover and had a 14-page detailed story about him inside. He's been on the cover of France's Rock and Roll Revue and Germany's Rockin' Fifties. He's forever stuck in time in those magazines, young and rocking.

He's started recording again, but this time on a small digital recorder in his home. He's put out three CDs on his own, a mix of new songs and a few of his old ones. It wasn't hard to find those old ones. They'd been included on various rock compilations over the years. And he didn't even know about it.